Heheh, my dwarves kept getting caught outside during seiges while they were hauling wood and whatnot - so I thought it'd be a neat idea to have hidey-hole tunnels throughout the board so they could do a quick duck into them when seiges occurred.

I was smart and made them trapped inside - but at the time I hadn't had a really big seige. So my first big seige comes along and my dwarves avoid the hidey-holes because they're panicked, but the goblins beeline for it and overwhelm the traps and get a straight entrance into the most vulnerable parts of my fortress *doh*!!

I was very careful with the cave river, installed a door as soon as my miners found it and slaughtered everything through fortifications before even thinking of doing anything there. But now I'm in the process of draining it to get access to the precious minerals exposed. I dug a wide two-level tunnel to drain the water into the pit and pierced the river from below.

It went surpirsingly well. None of the miners involved drowned, and the only casualty was some poor weaver who tried to collect the webs in the pit and was washed away. I was thinking that I probably should forbid those webs or something, but never got around to doing it. Not a huge murderous calamity, although it would have been preventable. The true tragedy is that calculating all the flowing water has dropped my framerate to about six. I'm hoping it'll get better once the riverbed is dry.

4 of my 10 champions died because they fell into the river fighting against snakemen.Cool part: I saw them wrestle some of the beasts to death WHILST they drowned.Now this is what I call "Superdwarvenly Though".

4 of my 10 champions died because they fell into the river fighting against snakemen.Cool part: I saw them wrestle some of the beasts to death WHILST they drowned.Now this is what I call "Superdwarvenly Though".

I think my most horrendous calamity was accidentally pulling the "**** this" lever and flooding a z-level of the fort with magma. It killed a few people who were asleep and burned up a the better part of my food stockpile, but I was able to keep going.

My current project, Dwarven Vivec (Its grand, though requires a load of rock and above-ground building), has an underground river. It was filled with alligators and frogmen and what have you. So. I sat up a target practice area for my marksdwarves.

The river turned red with the blood of the animals!

Although now I have to make sure the damn miasma doesn't spread. And since the river ends in a chasm, I think I'll make me that dwarven shower I've been wanting to try out. Lets see how that goes. (I have 289 dwarves to play around with, 71 of those are kids...And yet, I still manage to live...Hell, it feels weird starting new forts now and only have 7 dwarves to begin with...)

My current project, Dwarven Vivec (Its grand, though requires a load of rock and above-ground building)

Hell yeah, Vivec.

Worst thing that's happened to me so far is a slight miscalculation with a draining project ending up flooding my entire fort. I made sure that my next fort had some insane drainage, and constructed things in such a way that I could seal off and flood any inhabited level at any time, and then drain it with no harm to the other levels. Pain having every other level be exclusively waterworks, but it paid off.

Early on in one fort, I built a staircase down from the surface (ultimately winding up in my farming/cooking/brewing/eating area) to facilitate the move from from surface living down to the "proper" underground area. I then went off and forgot that it was there.

Well, after a while a goblin ambush was spotted by a fox or something. I eagerly waiting for them to enter my trap-filled Moat-Spanning Causeway o' Doom, which was outside the Gatehouse o' Doom, which was outside the Entry Corridor o' Doom, which was outside the Butchery Arena o' Doom. I was filled with sadistic glee as the vile creatures approached what was, in every possible sense of the word, overkill. Finally, they reached the Causeway o' Doom...and then turned aside.

Straight towards the stairway that, having forgotten about, I had neglected to seal off.

Before the ambush, my fort's population had been 43. By the time the last goblin died, my population was down to just 12, with five of my original seven counted among the dead. My Legendary original Miner, who had killed fully half the goblins himself, died shortly thereafter as dozens of dead friends and witnessed deaths drove him insane.

Another incident that almost, but not quite, resulted in a mass slaughter was in a later fort, and was the result of my first-ever waterworks projects. I built up/down stairs instead of up stairs in a spot that I was going to flood as part of the underground piping. Later, I was happily digging out exploratory mining tunnels, with nearly a hundred dwarves in those tunnels hauling ore and gems when I went off and dug right under that up/down stairway.

It gets better though. As it turns out, if there's a stone on a tile, it doesn't show the water. So I didn't know that things were flooding, and flooding fast, until I saw water seep into an empty tile. I managed to act fast enough to keep the deaths to six dwarves and one cat, but I irrevocably lost a Magnetite deposit, a full-blown vein of Platinum, five clusters' worth of ungathered raw gems, and the tunnels spanning more than half of that z-level.